{"id":15284,"date":"2012-05-29T11:10:15","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T16:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=15284"},"modified":"2012-05-29T11:12:07","modified_gmt":"2012-05-29T16:12:07","slug":"is-junk-science-more-credible-when-presented-with-a-british-accent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/05\/29\/is-junk-science-more-credible-when-presented-with-a-british-accent\/","title":{"rendered":"Is junk science more credible when presented with a British accent?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Slate<\/em>, Daniel Engber talks about how easy it is for British junk science journalism<\/a> to get republished in the United States:<\/p>\n

More damning was the story’s overseas origin. The five-second study arrived in the American press by way of the Daily Mail<\/em>, which explained in its own coverage that the work had been funded by a manufacturer of cleaning products, and then advised readers to replace their mop heads every three months so as to “minimize risk” from dangerous bacteria. When I contacted Manchester Metropolitan University for more details, I learned that the “researchers” and “scientists” described in media reports amounted to one person — a lab tech named Kathy Lees, who did not respond to my inquiries.<\/p>\n

Let’s not single out the Mancunians, though: Industry-funded science fluff litters the whole of the British Isles. Also in the past few weeks, the U.K. press fawned over a comely chip-shop girl from Kent who was found by a national television network to possess a scientifically validated, perfect face, while the British version of HuffPo<\/em> reported on a mathematical formula for the “perfect sandwich” — produced by a University of Warwick physicist in collaboration with a major bread manufacturer. Spurious mathematical formulae concocted at the behest of PR firms compose their own journalism beat in England: In recent years, we’ve seen the perfect boiled egg, the perfect day, the perfect breasts, and many more examples of scientists getting paid to turn life into algebra. As a naive magazine intern, I once took an assignment to write up one of these characteristically English equations — a means of calculating the perfect horror movie, in that case. The team of mathematicians behind the research turned out to be a couple of recent grads from King’s College London, who’d watched some movies and gotten drunk on vodka on behalf of Sky Broadcasting. “We only spent a couple of hours doing it,” one of them told me, “and didn’t put all that much thought into whether it works or how accurate it is.”\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love the use of the sure-to-be-useful-frequently term “labvertisements” for this sort of science-flavoured PR spam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Slate, Daniel Engber talks about how easy it is for British junk science journalism to get republished in the United States: More damning was the story’s overseas origin. The five-second study arrived in the American press by way of the Daily Mail, which explained in its own coverage that the work had been funded […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,28,16,13],"tags":[39,477,816,213,101],"class_list":["post-15284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","category-science","category-usa","tag-junkscience","tag-magazines","tag-manchester","tag-newspapers","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3Yw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15284"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15286,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15284\/revisions\/15286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}